Seminar

The seminar on Radicals and Conservatives in the Enlightenment forms part of a research project on Radical and Conservative Currents in the Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity, carried out in the years 2013 – 2016 by the Section of the History of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University, and funded from a grant received from the National Science Centre (NCN) by Professor Justyna Miklaszewska (Principal Investigator) and Dr. Anna Tomaszewska (Principal Project Assistant).

The aim of the research project is to address the question to what extent the ideas of the Enlightenment had an impact on the contemporary philosophy and ongoing social and political processes, in particular the process of secularization. Thus, the project comprises research on religion and its role in the public sphere, as well as on the issues related to cosmopolitanism – in the Enlightenment and nowadays – and the emergence of modern democracies due to the revolutionary ideas of the 1789 French Revolution. The authors of the project critically discuss the claim, formulated in the recent studies on the history of the Enlightenment philosophy, about the allegedly predominant radicalism of the epoch. They also challenge the view that it is the radicalism of the Enlightenment that accounts for the thoroughgoing changes in the way of thinking characteristic of the contemporary societies and individuals, as the source or even the efficient cause of these changes.

The seminar, whose thematic scope encompasses three groups of problems: religion,revolution, and cosmopolitanism, is intended to last from October 2013 until June2015, hosting prominent scholars from the Netherlands, Poland, the UK and the USA – philosophers and historians of philosophy specializing in the problems of the Enlightenment. All interested in the early modern philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – students and academics – are welcome to seminars on which keynote speakers present their lectures on different topics related to the theme of the project.

Questions about the seminar and each particular session can be directed to the organizers: